YouTube SEO: Optimize Your YouTube Video

Keywords, SEO, SEM, Linking, etc. What comes next to your mind? Gibberish?

Of course not! But what if it is? Fear not.

Once you are done with this article, you, your friends and your family members will all want to quit their jobs and become YouTubers. Why, you may ask? Well, it would be unwise to learn the secrets of a trade and then not utilize them. That’s like giving YouTube giving you the secret to free-ad-free advertisements forever and you, still not opting for it!

 

Getting back to the topic on hand. As a reader, you could be anyone. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have any prior knowledge in the sphere of digital marketing. Forget the past. Nobody likes crying over spilt milk, right? For the next 10 minutes or so, put down your phones, close the ‘Facebook’ tab that’s open right now and just open your eyes and read. You will not believe how simple it is.

 

So there are a couple of things that you should do to get the best SEO results for your YouTube video. Here’s the list:

 

1. Find the right “Video Keywords”

 

A video keyword is that keyword which when typed in the Google search box, triggers a number of video advertisements on the very first page. Common, we all have had this experience. You type something on Google’s search box and from out of nowhere, YouTube videos appear on the first page itself. These videos open because of the video keyword that’s been tagged. Unless you make use of video keywords, you will never be able to get traffic from Google search results. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out the potential traffic one is missing out on due to laziness. Finding a video keyword is not hard at all.

Let’s illustrate this process with an example: We are trying to find a video keyword to use for a funny cat video (crowd-favorite). Type in words that you think might be a good video keyword. It is important that the keyword you select is a video keyword, as in, it does trigger YouTube videos on the first page. In this case, here are a few examples of what your educated guess could be like:

Now, if you notice, the Google search results show YouTube videos. Hence, what does this mean? These are video keywords. Let’s look deeper into one of these search results.

 

The highlighted bit is exactly the video keyword that this particular video has targeted. Now, whenever you are deciding  your video keywords it’s important to make sure that the word that you choose gets at least more than 300 searches per month. Less than that and don’t expect too much increase in traffic.

Let’s highlight what’s explained above.

• Choose a video you want to optimize.
• Try different possible video keywords relevant to your video.
• Ensure that they do act as video keywords.
• Check out how many searches they word gets in a month.
• If more than 300, voila!

Some additional tips: How to……., Reviews, Tutorials, Anything fitness related and funny animal videos are recognized by Google as video related content.

2. Longer Video Descriptions

Understand this; Google doesn’t watch your video. Google doesn’t know who is acting in the video, or, what the video is about. It understands your video only to the extent that you explain to it. Yes, keywords, Google does understand. But in order to ensure that there is a keyword and content match, it relies heavily on other cues. If your video description is long, elaborate and detailed, Google will understand what your video is about. Once Google understands what your video is about, suddenly the keywords that you have targeted and entered in the description, becomes more meaningful and relevant and as a result, your video ranks higher. You get more views YouTube views. You are happy, Google is happy, your viewer is happy.

3. Quality & Quantity

Stating the obvious, that’s yet, still ignored, the better the quality of your video the better the ranking. Now, how does YouTube know whether the video is good or not?

• More the comments, the better.
• More the likes, the better.
• More the followers, the better.
• More the shares, the better.
• More the ‘thumbs up’, the better.
• The more the video is watched the better.

All of these are cues used by YouTube to judge the quality and popularity of the video. Also, just like long-descriptions, longer the video, the better. Ideally, if possible ensure that the video is longer than 5 minutes.

…….

Article’s not done just yet. There are a couple of other small things that you could to optimize your YouTube video:

• As in normal SEO optimization, try to include your target words at the very beginning of the video title.

As you can see, ‘Funny Cat Videos’ is most likely the targeted keyword for these videos and it generally appea]rs at the very beginning of the title.

• Try to get as many real views, followers, comments etc. as possible. Getting fake reactions doesn’t help and in fact, it adversely affects your video’s ranking. Some ways to get genuine reactions is by posting videos on relevant Quora topics, signing of emails with video links, using your social influence to get people to really watch it etc.